It seems you're talking about some Perl crusade. I'm not afraid, thank you, but frankly, I don't really care what happens with Perl (and I'm talking about Perl 5/7). I'm sorry that you hear it as a Perl contributor.
Come on, first - words can't harm Perl. "There are two types of programming languages, ones that no one uses and ones people complain about" - that's B. Stroustrup. Second, if you're saying "stop saying it has problems", if you deny it, you can never think of those objectively and critically, which is imperative for improvement. Third, PHP did a lot more harm to Perl, in terms of popularity, than any words.
OK, if you want it, these aren't facts, these are my opinions. It just happens that a lot of people share those.
Perl is highly dynamic. So much that it has Lisp problem: how many different Object Programming systems you know for Perl? Some of them resemble CLOS, btw. This is not a coincedence.
Then, the evaluation result depends on the LVALUE type. This is nuts to me, very hard to see and hard to debug.
Then, due to the fact the syntax can be changed, and the object system can be changed, and almost ANYTHING can be changed - forget about parsing Perl without Perl, or running static analyzers or some other modern stuff.
And you have to apply strict coding practices for a large codebase to be readable. Or you'll get a funny-looking mess making the same thing happen in 10 different ways.
It seems you're talking about some Perl crusade. I'm not afraid, thank you, but frankly, I don't really care what happens with Perl (and I'm talking about Perl 5/7). I'm sorry that you hear it as a Perl contributor.
Come on, first - words can't harm Perl. "There are two types of programming languages, ones that no one uses and ones people complain about" - that's B. Stroustrup. Second, if you're saying "stop saying it has problems", if you deny it, you can never think of those objectively and critically, which is imperative for improvement. Third, PHP did a lot more harm to Perl, in terms of popularity, than any words.
OK, if you want it, these aren't facts, these are my opinions. It just happens that a lot of people share those.
thank you.
I also like the constructive criticism of Perl.
On the other hand, there are so many terrible words that I am sensitive.